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Year-End Movie Catchup Edition

So. we’re coming up on New Years, and I have, surprisingly not been watching movies constantly. My wife’s had some health issues that have required my hovering helplessly over her while she tries to shoo me away, so let’s just say I haven’t really been in the mood lately.

That hasn’t really stopped me, just slowed me down somewhat. Once I realized the only thing keeping me glued to The List was me, I calmed down considerably. I’m probably going to miss the self-imposed year’s end deadline by one movie, and if that causes the world to end, well, I’ll be giving the Mayans hell in Xibalba. “One movie? Really?”

This also hasn’t stopped me from devising next year’s list. I’ll post that after New Year’s. I’m looking forward to it.

So what did I manage to accomplish?

Major Dundee is a problematic movie, apparently as much to make as it is to watch. This was supposed to be Sam Peckinpah’s first big-budget movie, but new studio management cut his budget and his production time, so it’s likely a minor miracle that Peckinpah didn’t leave bullet holes in office walls. He and star Charlton Heston clashed mightily (though Heston at least once interceded on the director’s behalf) and the movie was eventually taken away and recut from two and a half hours down to a more manageable two. What I saw was a restored 136 minute version.

Heston is the title character, a Union soldier chafing under his assignment to run a prisoner of war compound. The possibility of more action is offered by the rampage of a murderous renegade, Sierra Charriba (Michael Pate) and his band of Apaches. The only problem is, to form a regiment large enough to pursue and engage the enemy, he has to recruit a number of his Confederate prisoners, who are led by an old friend, Captain Tyreen (Richard Harris). He also has a number of outsiders and general sketchy types, such as Slim Pickens and R.G. Armstrong as a two-fisted clergyman with a hate on for the Injun who decimated his flock. Not to mention James Coburn as a one-armed scout. And a number of black Union soldiers who want to prove they’re just as good as the white soldiers.

This is a hell of a setup for an action movie, a ragtag bunch who’d just as soon shoot each other as the enemy. You already know that there’s going to be some internal skirmishes, some respect is going to be garnered, some unlikely friendships are going to be formed.

Well, forget all this, this is a revisionist Western, and we have no time for it. In fact, Peckinpah made a damned good start on the revisionist western with his first feature, Ride The Wild Country, and there had certainly been others, but Dundee is Peckinpah’s put-up-or-shut-up to the others. He had been shopping around a movie about George Custer, but decided Dundee hit the same points his Custer project intended to, and accepted the job. Our mob follows Charriba through Texas and into Mexico, and after a nighttime engagement that goes poorly, Dundee and troops head into a nearby village, where they engage instead the occupying French army, gaining the admiration of the much put-upon village but garnering a new formidable enemy.

Once they decide to head to this village, Charriba is going to vanish from the proceedings for the next hour or more. The conflict becomes more between Dundee and Tyreen, especially when Senta Berger crops up as a German woman helping the unfortunates in the village. Dundee gets wounded while dallying with her, is smuggled into another village for treatment, falls into an alcoholic fugue until Tyreen and men sweep back in to extract him, and then we are – finally! – back into the movie we started.

No wonder this was cut. The first 45 minutes and the last 15 serve up a fairly coherent story. The other hour and fifteen serves to give us a pencil sketch of the rest of Peckinpah’s movie career – echoes of the far superior The Wild Bunch abound – but prove to be a slog, especially Dundee’s Lost Weekend segment. It is to Heston’s credit that Dundee is a pretty unsympathetic character, especially for a title character, and plays him as such – which probably gave the studio suits more than a little stomach acid on top of the other ulcers the movie was giving them.

For me, the best part of the movie is watching what would become Peckinpah’s stock company – Slim Pickens, R.G. Armstrong, L.Q. Jones, Ben Johnson, and especially Warren Oates – as backup singers in the troop, and wishing they had been given more screen time. Which would also have been ruthlessly cut out, anyway.

Problematic in another way is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is a spiritual (at least) follow-up to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 movie starring Harvey Keitel. This one stars Nicolas Cage. I do like Cage a lot – he plays crazy and obsessed like few actors, but he needs a good director for guidance, or the result is simply bad cinema. But if there is one director who knows how to handle crazy, it’s Werner Herzog, and Bad Lieutenant is one of Cage’s better outings as an actor in some years.

Cage is Terence McDonagh, a New Orleans detective who saves a prisoner from a flooding cell just after Hurricane Katrina, injuring his back in the process. Prescribed vicodin for the pain, McDonagh is, six months later, a high-functioning junkie, but the high-functioning part is starting to get dubious. When his contact at the Evidence Room cuts him off, McDonagh starts looking desperately for other drug sources, even as he gets deeper into a drug-related multiple homicide investigation. Finally he screws up big time and he finds himself allied with the man he was hunting down: drug lord Big Fate (Xzibit) after which things get even worse.

The central question of “Did Bad Lieutenant even need a sequel?” is one that’s never really answered. There’s a general try to match the earlier movie’s visceral punch, but it never quite succeeds. Even with hallucinations of iguanas and Eva Mendes as Cage’s hooker girlfriend, it generally looks and feels like an HBO drama gone slightly off the rails. Worth seeing, but not life or game-changing.

Continuing my twisted anti-hero run was Drive, which everyone was exclaiming about earlier this year. Ryan Gosling earns his movie star stripes as Driver, a mechanic who works Hollywood auto stunts when he can, and moonlights as wheelman for crimes when he can’t. Driver is a prodigy on wheels, amply proven in a tense getaway sequence at the very beginning of the movie. More or less by accident, he meets his neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), who has a young son. They hit it off, Driver finds himself falling in love with her… and then her husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac) gets out of prison.

Standard owes some shady types protection money from when he was inside, and they want him to pull a pawn shop robbery to clear his debt. When Irene and her son are threatened, Driver offers to be the wheelman for the job. But there is a deeper double cross going on, and Driver finds himself in possession of a million dollars and two dead associates. The path from there gets tangled, but it all comes down to two minor-league gangsters, played by Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks, and Driver goes on the offensive to save the woman he loves.

Drive is an impressive-looking movie, with an often beautiful synthesis between image and sound, and a beautifully modern soundtrack; this is the best Michael Mann movie that wasn’t made by Michael Mann. Though I find myself more than willing to credit Driver’s ability behind the wheel, I find myself wondering just how the hell he became savvy enough to take out three professional hit men. Then again (shrug), it’s an action movie, sort of. When has that ever stopped me enjoying one? Ron Perlman is good as usual, but the real revelation is Albert Brooks, playing a fairly normal businessman capable of turning into a vicious thug at a moment’s notice. He’s very good at the quiet menace thing, and he was up for several best supporting acting awards, although not the all-important Academy Award.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn has a nice filmography behind him, and is apparently now developing the movie version of The Equalizer. I loved that show, and Drive proves him a very good fit for the material.

Speaking of material – and I used the word flawed a little earlier – I finally watched Sucker Punch before the year was out, and found why I was able to buy the two-disc Blu-ray edition for three bucks and change.

I don’t know where to start, so I’m not going to. Ugly, muddled story in an ugly, muddled world. The “Fantasy Realms” stuff was gorgeous, and makes me wonder why Zack Snyder didn’t just make a live-action anime if that was the intention. What I found myself sitting through was Zack Snyder first attempting to make a Baz Luhrmann movie, then deciding that Tarsem Singh fella had some good ideas, too. This is one destined for the SwapaDVD pile, and they likely already have a dozen or so on file.

Also, Carla Gugino, honey. What gypsy did you piss off that you keep being in movies like this? Do I need to call someone?

Though I’ve a couple of others, Johnny Firecloud is the last movie I’m going to jam into this post, as it fits the twisted anti-hero motif that seems to have spontaneously generated itself. This is on a Something Weird double feature disc with Bummer!, another David F. Friedman-produced flick, and it actually proved itself to have some surprises in store.

The first surprise was the 20th Century Fox logo at the start. The second was that the movie was shot in Panavision. This was not the grimy revenge flick I had been led to expect by the trailer and exploitation movie books. This was intended to be released to hardtops, not drive-ins.

This is Friedman’s most expensive movie, to be sure. Apparently he put aside his usual animosity toward investors and actually put together a SAG shoot, with a commensurate uptick in quality, both in production value and talent.

The title character, Johnny Firecloud (Victor Mohica) is an American Indian who returns from Vietnam to find his home town more than ever under the thumb of rancher Colby (Ralph Meeker), and things worse than ever on the reservation. Colby has it in for Johnny, mainly because he got the rancher’s daughter pregnant before shipping out (though this is something Johnny doesn’t know). The town Sheriff, played by David Canary, is the unwilling tool by which Johnny is hassled, until things rather come to a head when Johnny’s grandfather is lynched, and the Indian schoolmarm gang-raped by Colby’s goon squad. Then Johnny, who once sneered at his grandfather’s “traditions” goes on the warpath and offs the good squad in bloody traditional ways, like scalping, tomahawks to the head, being buried up to the neck and left for the buzzards, you know. The usual.

Firecloud tries to take the high road when it can. It takes nearly an hour to get to the warpath segment, an hour of racism, character work, and a general tour of Asshole Town. The trailer, of course, concentrates on the bloody revenge aspect, but as i said – that’s all in the last half-hour. The reason why Sheriff Jessie bends the knee to Colby is rather startling for ’75 – turns out that while he was in the Army, Jessie was raped and then dishonorably discharged as a homosexual! Colby’s daughter, played by Christina Hart, also gets some more dimension as the story progresses. Hell, the movie’s end – which ends on an unfinished note, though the pieces are in place for Colby’s final comeuppance – even takes the high road.

Ralph Meeker was really a good actor who got stuck playing rotten bad guys because he was so good at it. He wanted to play the Sheriff, to get a sympathetic role for the first time since, probably, Paths of Glory, but nope. You got the villain role, man. David Canary usually gets singled out as the one thing that almost salvages Johnny Firecloud, and that is the truth. Canary has five daytime Emmys for his work on All My Children, and they ain’t just for show. His turn as the tormented Jessie is about as three-dimensional as anybody gets in this movie, and the cinema’s loss was definitely TV’s gain.

I guess we can’t go without mentioning the movie’s stunt casting, and that’s Sacheen Littlefeather as the doomed schoolmarm, Nenya. Littlefeather is most famous as the woman who appeared for Marlon Brando at the ’72 Oscars to turn down the Best Actor Award for Godfather and deliver a short manifesto on the mistreatment on Indians. (No matter your politics, you have to admit that took guts on the lady’s behalf. I still remember the boos from the audience.) Of course, at this cynical remove, we can also reflect that her birth name was Maria Cruz, and she was only half-Indian – but then, that’s probably more than Frank DeKova, who played the grandfather, Chief White Eagle. Hell, even the star, Victor Mohica, was really Puerto Rican.

Johnny Firecloud comes that close to being a good movie, but it didn’t make a choice. It tried to be Billy Jack crossed with Walking Tall – and that’s a concept that gets a movie made, but to what end? The cast of characters of a decent morality play is there, but the execution of the revenge portion seems rushed, and when Jessie’s deputy mentions all they have to do is stake out Johnny’s dwindling list of victims, he speaks for the audience.

Then again, you’re listening to someone who expected a gritty, nasty little revenge flick and got – well, Billy Jack crossed with Walking Tall. And I actually didn’t like either of those, anyway.

So there we are. Lookie there, it’s New Year’s Eve and I only have one movie left to watch. See you on the other side, where I’ll blither about that.